Hello, and thank you for listening to the MicroBinFeed podcast. Here, we will be
discussing topics in microbial bioinformatics. We hope that we can give you some
insights, tips, and tricks along the way. There is so much information we all
know from working in the field, but nobody writes it down. There is no manual,
and it's assumed you'll pick it up. We hope to fill in a few of these gaps. My
co-hosts are Dr. Nabil Ali Khan and Dr. Andrew Page. I am Dr. Lee Katz. Both
Andrew and Nabil work in the Quadram Institute in Norwich, UK, where they work
on microbes in food and the impact on human health. I work at Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention and am an adjunct member at the University of
Georgia in the U.S. Right, so this is the very first episode where all three
MicroBinFeeds are together, and this is the first time it's ever happened. Every
other time has been on Zoom, so thank you very much to Nabil and for Lee, you
know, for flying over from America just for this episode, but we're also joined
by Torsen Seaman as well, who is going to keep us on track. So today we're going
to talk about loss in translation, the barrier between research, mathematics,
and what actually happens in the real world in public health. So Torsen, do you
have any questions for us? We haven't seen you in a long time, mate. You were
back on episode six, you know, it's been a few years. I know, like most of you,
I've been hibernating for various reasons, COVID, pandemic-related work. I'd
love to sort of hear what kind of trials and tribulations and fun you had
working in COVID, so we can compare war stories from the pandemic. Not the
boring stuff, the fun stuff. The fun stuff. Well, I mean, we had a lot more
COVID than you guys, you, you know, being a huge island, you know, kept it all
out, whereas we had a constant flow and a lot more business. Britain is also an
island. Don't tell anyone that. It's true. We did close our borders, but we had
lots of citizens returning, return travellers. So return travellers were all our
introductions. So that was something quite different to what many countries
experienced. So you had high quality epi then, you know, to trace all of these
back into quarantine and you kept it all out no matter what. Yeah. We had lots
of good epi about hotel quarantine and travel history, and yeah, even things
like picking up in-flight transmissions was quite interesting. Serious. So that
was in the early stages of that. That was of great interest to the federal
government, like, were there being in-flight transitions? And we had a couple of
analyses where, yeah, there was a lot of evidence that the transmission actually
happened during the flight because, you know, two separate countries, people
getting on the same plane at Singapore, for example, which is a big hub for Asia
Pacific. And then, you know, looking at the data, genomically proved that it
couldn't have probably happened any other way except within the aeroplane
itself. So that became a big concern. And I think that resulted in, you know,
some policy around masks and separation of people in aeroplanes and high
filtration levels and things like that. And also the flights are long enough
that you could get on a plane and 17 hours later, you know, you won't go from
negative to positive and, you know, highly symptomatic. Yeah, I wonder if they
were doing, rat tests weren't really around yet at that point, but it would have
been fascinating to do rat tests every six hours during the flight to see the
progression of the disease. If you were a PCR and a rapid PCR on the plane,
could you even do that? I'm not a lab person, but I'm sure you could put a lab
in a small lab in a box. We gotta try that. Do you need a centrifuge? I think...
To spin down? Let's not reveal how ignorant we are at this point. Must have
biology or something. Well, I recall, you know, the back in the day when MinION
was being used in the field by ecologists and stuff, that, you know, one of the
arguments was, well, the MinION part's easy. How do you extract the DNA and make
the sample? And, you know, there was this... Nanopore had their Voltrex that
never really quite worked. But I heard that some people in the field, you needed
a centrifuge and they were using their four-wheel-drive axle, they were using
the wheel to drive a centrifuge from the four-wheel-drive. That's brilliant. So,
yeah, that was pretty cool. So I think a centrifuge must be an important part of
the spinning down process. I remember for Nanopore, some people going out to
like schools to do demos and all that and they'd just heat stuff up in their
hands, you know, just hold and the body heat would, you know, warm it up to the
required temperature. Ah, so instead of the old-school way of thermo-cycling
from moving from water bath to water bath, they would, like, use their hands?
Yeah. Oh, that might happen. You've got solid spinners actually now, like, with
your little manual centrifuges. Could work quite well. Quite cheap. I think you
do need the centrifuge, though, for certain things. Like when I was, 25 years
ago, when I was in the lab, we'd have to purify DNA using that kind of technique
with the kayak heads and stuff. So we'll have to try it. Can I actually... Lab
in a box on a flight. Lee here has pointed out that he has done some bench work
in the past. Have I, Nabil or Andrew, have you done any lab work? Ever? I
stopped doing biology when I was about 16, so I did zero bench work. I've done
two PCRs and one of them worked. So, yeah, I have actually done... I have done
seven days of molecular biology training. Our Monash University had a famous
annual course called the Recombinant DNA Training Course, and it was... A lot of
people used it for their continuing education to get refreshed. And I asked if I
could do it, because I wanted... I was only in bioinformatics, and I wanted to
get a feel for what actually happens on the bench so I could better understand
the processes. And so they let me do it. And, you know, you got paired up with a
tutor. Yeah, we did everything. We did DNA extraction, virus extraction from a
plant. They had this infected plant that they gave everyone a leaf and you had
to extract DNA and virus. Had to clone a gene into a vector. Had to express
that. Did capillary sequencing. My sequence turned out terrible. It didn't work
at all. It must have been a mixture or something. But, yeah, I really got to do
it all. And I actually won the destruction award because I dropped my timer and
it smashed and the battery fell over the lab floor. I overwhelmed my pipette on
one of the settings and nearly broke it. And then I spilled... When I was
flaming... You know how you do this flaming thing with the bottle to keep things
sterile or whatever? I spilled alcohol on the bench and the bench caught fire.
Oh my gosh. This is the destruction award? Destruction. Destruction.
Destruction. Yeah, most students do one of those things. Yeah, I did all three.
And so it made it clear that bioinformatics was the right career choice for me.
No one can say you're not comprehensive and thorough. Did you say you did this
all in a week off? Yeah, in a week. So it started on Sunday. It started on
Sunday and it went from 8pm to 6pm every day. You're doing multiple experiments
in parallel and theory and practice. It was the most intense week of my life.
And the following week I fell ill with cytomegalovirus and I was sick for three
months. I think the stress of this course must have triggered something. And I
was out for months. With fevers every night for three months. That's how much...
That's just from lab work. Lab work induces fevers. Maybe it was an infected
plant. No, no, I think it was something... I was told that CMV, cytomegalovirus,
I mentioned it to a couple of colleagues and they said Oh, you're a new dad,
that's normal. And it turns out that new fathers... Most of the population has
CMV already, latent. But about 20% of the population apparently doesn't have it.
And clearly I didn't get to kiss enough girls or something when I was young. So
I never caught it. So he said it's common in new fathers because babies get it
and they're not affected by it. And they shed it in their urine. And I was
changing a lot of nappies. And he says it's classic presentation. New dad, CMV.
So no other doctor said it. As soon as I said it, he said, yeah, new dad, I see
it all the time. So yeah, I wasn't a new dad at the time. Lack of sleep, intense
course. If you don't have kids, then obviously, just to paint a picture, when
you're boys, they piss everywhere when you are trying to change your nappies.
Yeah, a lot of airborne streams of fluid. Absolutely, yeah. Can confirm, it's a
different kind of aerosol. I promised I washed my hands, but he obviously can't
account for everything. I had an experience also when I first joined CDC. I was
one of the first bioinformaticians. And I was going to be at the computer all
the time. And then they said, no, you need to learn how to run PFGE. And they
forced me into the lab for a couple of days. And I did run PFGE. I did quite
well. I can find that gel somewhere, probably. I had really good bands. They
complimented me. And I never wanted to go back again. But it helped me be a
better member of the team and to be in there with everybody else. Yeah, I had a
great appreciation for what goes on. Especially where errors can creep in and
why things don't always work out. I think it's a great exercise to go through.
Whereas my experience in the lab is I have posed for some photos with a pet and
some buffer, you know. I've done it a few times now to make it look like I'm a
scientist. We're not allowed to take photos of anything in the laboratory. It's
against the law. You need to get special permission to take photos of any lab
stuff It's a public health lab. Biosecurity related. That's like legislated or
is it part of the policy? It's probably just the health law. I don't know
actually. So during the pandemic I found it was quite interesting going from
research and then seeing insights into public health labs, you know. Because in
research we just do things kind of not willy-nilly, but you know we're more
adventurous with what kind of protocols we'll do. And we'll tweak stuff left,
right and center. We may not run controls every time. Whereas in public health,
you know, it's quite a different environment as you guys well know. Having moved
from research to public health, I also noticed that as well. It's very
interesting.  frustrating when you first start. You feel like nothing, you can't
get anything done and it's too much, too many rules and steps but it's all for
good reasons. I mean these decisions, the decisions that get made from what we
present are real decisions. So in the pandemic like our genomic results directly
discovered a major hotel quarantine outbreak and also there was a big giant
residential tower that was immediately locked down and due to the results that
we presented and you know this affected people being locked in their building
for like weeks and so yeah you want to make sure 100% that what you're
presenting is correct. And not just contamination or a sample swap. Exactly.
It's a little flattering that they listen to you though also. Yeah we'd already
built a good relationship with our department of health you know doing genomics
to foodborne pathogens and they built a lot of trust in the results and it
wasn't just a genomics we always did in consultations with the epi's and you
know the department admin and so that relationship really was established before
COVID came along and then with COVID they really put a lot of trust into us and
we took it seriously. We didn't just like you said present results willy-nilly,
we sort of poured over them, made sure we were had some degree of confidence in
what we were telling them. From the bioinformatics point of view it wasn't
really, a lot of it wasn't my responsibility. The epi's took the, the genomic
epi's took the front of the questions and stuff but yeah we were there in all
meetings, there were bioinformaticians in all important meetings in the pandemic
and now in all department meetings there's always a bioinformatician because we
need that you know that support to the epi's when that questions get asked and
they you know they're trying to assess how real the results are then we can sort
of say you know with COVID there's missing data, so samples can migrate in the
tree and things like that. So it's just been an amazing transformation from
bioinformaticians being in the basement type approach to now they're being in
the front of house as a first-class citizen along with the epi's and the medical
microbiologists. Incredible. There was one study that you did that I came across
and actually this is the first chance I have to to tell you about it. I think
when I was pulled into the response for COVID one of the things I had to do was
figure out if people could get reinfected and you know that's that's like a
lifetime ago now but back then we had I think about like three months of data or
something this is all published and I had to help them with the genomics of
figuring out if if somebody like if we had we had certain cases we could look at
before and after like infection one infection two and we could look at the
results in between also and figuring out if it's the same genome in infection
one infection two and I was like maybe I'll do like an all versus all comparison
see what it looks like I'll check the literature and see if anyone else has done
this and I found one of your papers and you did exactly what I was thinking and
you already published it in a pre-print do you remember this one was that a
hospital a small number of samples um memory has been a bit damaged from COVID
pandemic like I'm really struggling to remember all the projects we did I don't
remember so yeah I don't have this in front of me either I think you had like
but there was one where we had multiple samples of patients over time and
looking at intra host diversity versus inter patient diversity and stuff like
that it was really hard it was a hard project because you know the data is a bit
questionable and I think we only really looked at it from the consensus level
what we should have done if we had times to go back and look at the raw fast q
data because two separate infections one of them if it was close enough could
have been a mixture or a minor allele fraction in that original sample that then
became the dominant clone in the second infection like was it late in all that
time or was it a new infection that yeah that's a common question we got and we
just didn't have time to look at most of it but I think there's a lot of people
now look going back to data that's been deposited like as I know the US and the
UK have been awesome at depositing their fast q data so a lot of these studies
can be done assuming the metadata about what cases are from the same patient is
available yeah we had very little metadata especially because we had to get from
the states and get permission and all that but yeah you have to make sure the
metadata is good because you can't just you can't go at it alone with just
genomics and you get at the siren project which was to sample healthcare workers
and then sequence them so the idea is that healthcare workers would first in the
front line you know if they're if there's an infection stable ones who were
infected first and I did it fine some at the end of course I've had to cover
three times now so I can tell you you can get reinfected but there's all these
thresholds that put in like you know you have to have 90 days between the first
positive test and the second just to make sure try and make sure that you know
you're not just seeing the same thing again that's just popped up again yeah
well actually talking about we haven't caught up in a few years so yeah so so
coming out of hibernation you know from the last three years of finally getting
to meet you guys in person again I speaking to Andrew, Andrew you were telling
me that you were involved in the COVID response and you're at a research
organization I just assumed that only public health labs were involved in the
COVID response and can you tell me a bit more about like how you were involved
in the UK crowdsourcing effort yeah so basically a conference you go to every
two years ABPHM and essentially half that conference just were pulled into the
Cog UK project and because you already have a new most people are working on
bacteria actually and so it was just all these pre-existing links were tapped
very rapidly by you know like Nick Loman and Sharon Peacock and people like that
all the big names and they're all folded in and so we just became one of the
labs doing sequencing for the Cog UK project and yeah like I shared an office
with a guy called Tom Connor who part-time and he was doing public health Wales
and so he was like oh you know do you guys want to come in on this I said yeah
sure why not we can do sequencing you got sequencers you got staff everyone
wanted to help you know everyone was super enthusiastic and so that's how we
initially got into doing the sequencing and the idea was basically everyone
would tap into their local hospitals and we shared campus with the regional
diagnostic unit for doing viral testing and so we could get samples very easily
and so that's how that kind of got started and then it kind of snowballed from
there you know we're doing more and more and we're doing mathematics analysis
and then we started doing national surveillance and we're doing international
cities so you know it all kind of expanded from there and we're a research you
know but we're doing you know production level stuff so every week in week out
we have to get samples in and out the door and do it right and you know all the
additional quality controls that you'd have in a public health lab we had to
start enforcing ourselves where did those protocols come from were they shared
with you or and how did the governance of the data work like it was made up on
the fly everything you know everything happened at pace you know so the
protocols came from like josh quick he developed the arctic protocol we just uh
basically parmers made up slightly in advance and because we figured we'd do a
little bit of this and got them made up and then they're just ready to go you
know and we're actually up and running very very fast within about eight days of
giving an odd we're up and running sequencing in production which is kind of
cool what slowed us down was paperwork but even that was done super fast you
know all the ethics all the contracts everything was signed like it was all
expedited very quickly and we're talking like march like early 2020 right we
started sample collection on the 8th of april 2020 and then we finished
sequencing mid-april 2022 so we did over two years two years every single week
including christmas yeah i still remember february the 14th 2020 valentine's day
in melbourne it was a friday and my boss said to me toss you and the bnp should
probably not come in next week we might have to work from home for a little
while two and a half years later we're still working from home still sequencing
carbon still reporting carbon yeah we got out of that thank god but it was a it
was a push it was a sprint right till the bitter end you know and we got more
and more samples coming in because you know they were still trying to sequence
all the omicron and whatever and then it just kind of luckily people said okay
we don't need to sequence everything we can you know scale back and you know
give everyone a break and researchers can go back to doing research rather than
public health i know a couple of things we we probably borrowed a couple of
things from you like i i think that our public health labs saw josh quick's um
protocols.io and they they adapted it for themselves and and maybe a few other
things and i thought it was kind of genius to go straight to something like
protocols.io to to make it kind of crowdsourced absolutely yeah it's very handy
yes agreed that became a great resource for lots of labs around australia new
zealand you know the midnight protocol the jse the protocol arctic protocol and
so on so you too okay we've opted around as well correct yeah we have corona had
we developed our own so in terms of uh data governance though we weren't given
sensitive patient information we were usually given a lab id from the clinical
lab so they knew so when we said this such and such was in this lineage and such
and such was in that lineage they knew what that meant but we didn't know much
more than say the patient sex and which county it was from or you know things
like that so it's quite vague for us how secure did you have to be with that
data because a lab and a lab name and a lab id if there's records at the lab the
pathology center they can link that to so you have to be very careful so the nhs
the national level it people came in and audited climb which is what we're using
the the virtual  machines we were using to make sure it was secure enough and
then you had to have a two-factor authentication brought in. But you're right, I
mean it was pseudo-anonymized but it wasn't fully anonymized. So we had an
elevated access and you had to sign a lot of contracts and whatever and you had
to promise not to try and reverse engineer the names. But the UK passed
legislation to get rid of all privacy concerns. Because it was a public health
emergency, usually it was enough to be able to go back to the hospital or to
public health authorities and say this is the ID and then they would look it up
for us and say okay, you know, they would do the hard work, you know, of linking
all the people and the information and all that. Wow, that's very impressive
that all that stuff was expedited and permissions and it all just kind of
worked. Yeah. That didn't happen to that extent in Australia. It was a lot of
hard work. And some people, like my colleague, Justin McGrady, who was another
PI doing the wet lab side initially, he was bringing random public health people
and trying to go through and find the exact people he could talk to on the
ground who would give him answers. And he did in the end and it made life a lot
easier. We could go direct to local people to discuss outbreaks and cases that
we were seeing rather than having to go to maybe a national structure and then
back down again. And it's a few weeks later, by chance, we've passed the message
along. And when you had to report these results to hospitals or to public health
units, was there a language gap? At first? Yeah, I think so. And we've got to
remember COVID, what you were reporting about COVID changed over time, right? So
initially you were talking lineages, everything were in separate lineages, you
didn't have variants, there were no such thing as variants of concern. Remember,
in the early days, you had lineages and you had proper epi and you had
differences between them. And you had distances between each of those lineages
that you were trying to communicate. And then it switched over to all this VOC
stuff where it's just like, you know, alpha, beta, whatever. And it was just
like, which one is it? So that changed over time. But initially there were a lot
of gaps of is this related or not? Because you can say, you can just read off
the number and say, well, this is two snips away or three snips away or
whatever. But then obviously that's not a meaningful thing to a clinician. They
say, well, is it the same thing? Does that mean this patient got this from this
other person or not? And I think Andrew did a lot of reporting back. In the
early days, I didn't know what to report. I was making up as we went along, to
be quite frank. And so in the early days, I was telling the local infection
control doctors and the local public health authority. I didn't know what to
report. So I ended up doing things like, say, given the local medics in this
county, we were seeing 10 different clusters or a hundred different clusters and
it's going up and down, you know, kind of like a weather forecast or, you know,
an overview of what's kind of happening in the region and then which areas have
hotspots and which connected stuff and which don't and things like that. And
then the first real report that I remember had impact was on care homes, where
we were asked to look at a particular care home, which had a higher mortality
rate. And they want to know, is there snips in there that are making it a
problem? And when we actually looked at it, we found there was like this
particular lineage of two snips that were unique. And then we looked on a map
and we could see a heat map of the postcodes, the zip codes, and could see that
it was, you know, very old people over the age of 80 in particular little places
on the map. And it's like, hang on a second, there's a problem here. And then
when we went and looked further, there were actually care homes, six different
care homes, and the care homes were infecting each other. And they're doing very
well at keeping out all the strains and clusters from the community, but not
from infecting, cross-infecting of the staff or anything like that. So that was
kind of our first kind of impactful thing. But then what we found was it took
weeks to get the public health body interested in it. And by that time,
obviously the outbreaks had finished, but we then had the established link so
that, you know, next time something came up, we could actually take action
immediately. So I don't know if I can give the detail, but at the time, the real
world reality was that you had lockdowns, so people couldn't see their nan in
the care homes. So there wasn't like a community transmission. But then the care
home staff were all on rotation amongst the different, you know, different
sites. Exactly the same problem in Australia. Agency workers that move between
sites. Yeah. And so when you, in hindsight, you go, well, obviously that's a
problem, but I guess the logistics, the mechanics of it, like how else are you
going to staff the care homes though? Australia banned, we banned it in
Victoria. Australia banned working in multiple aged care homes, I believe at
some point. Wow. To restrict that into home transmission problems. Yeah. But
that was, yeah, that was, that was like it. There were bigger problems, like
people weren't being paid if they were sick, you know, or had to self-isolate.
And like care home workers are not paid a lot of money. It's usually like the
minimum wage type jobs. And so there were those issues that had to be addressed
as well. Did UK introduce legislation to help those people? Yeah. Australia also
did similar. We had, you know, salary support for when you had to go on COVID
leave and stuff. You could just fill in a form, no questions asked, and you
would get your two week salary. Yeah. Then it went the other way and they went
for intensive testing. And then people work in care homes and in some cases
residents were being tested intensively and those are being directed to
particular testing sites, testing centres. And then they were being sequenced as
a priority. So, you know, they went from one extreme to the other. So bad
surveillance to really good surveillance. Can you tell us a bit about the
states, Lee? Like, given, I know you work for the CDC and the CDC isn't a
central authority. There's all state labs and county labs and how, what, what,
what was CDC's role in the sort of the pandemic that you, as you understand it?
I am, I'm going to say as much as I can say, and then like, I don't think I know
enough. It's yeah, it's a hard question to represent a whole country of 300
million people or whatever. It's so federated. It's so we're, we, we supply a
lot of information and help coordinate a lot, but then the state health labs are
really, they're the actual authority for most things that happen, especially
with COVID. And so, I don't know, I guess we, we, we provided a lot of support.
At one point I went back to the COVID response as the technical team lead,
actually for the, for helping out with bioinformatics in the states. We got a
lot of stuff done as when I was technical lead, I was able to coordinate with a
state lab and a few partners who adapted Josh Quick's protocol, especially Joel
Savinsky. And we're able to come up with other protocols and coordinate with
other people to basically make something more centralized and help out the
states more. And, and I don't know, just overall, we, we did help coordinate
with bioinformatics, but it's, it's coordination, you know, it's not something I
can be like front lines, like how you guys are describing it with, with the
being front lines with like politicians or decision makers, not all the time.
Yeah. I mean, Australia is also a federation. We haven't, we only have seven or
so states compared to your 50 or whatever. And yeah, we faced, we don't have a
CDC, so we don't have a national, like official kind of CDC. And there's
actually talks right now that to set up an Australian CDC for future pandemic
preparators, but they'll never have full authority. And I think we would have
the same problems you have. We don't have full authority over the states, but
you have a more coordinating role and a role in sort of kind of getting people
to agree. And I guess mostly for the shared data, can you tell us how, how the
counties shared data or the state labs shared data? Was there a central
repository or how did, how did it work? Or was it more ad hoc? I, again, I don't
think I can speak totally towards it just because of my lack of knowledge,
there's a lot going on, but eventually the states and local health labs got
coordinated enough where they were. In the beginning, they were sending samples
to CDC to get them genome sequenced. And eventually they started all doing it on
their own. And those sequences all got deposited either in GISTAID or NCBI. And
so we were able to coordinate on that level. And what about you guys in the UK?
As I understand it, kind of the England, Public Health England, which has now
been renamed, right? Yeah, UK HSA, Health Security Agency. But in the UK as
well, it's four countries with different laws and different ways of doing
things, you know, because public health has devolved to nations. So like Wales
did it very differently to England, you know, but obviously different sized
countries. Wales decided, oh, we'll sequence everything. We'll do it through one
system, you know, one kind of coordinated effort. And that worked really, really
well. Is that the COG UK that we all heard about? Well, COG was sitting outside
of that and talking to each of the nations and maybe facilitating data sharing
in a way that might not have happened if they were just trying to do it directly
the old fashioned way. Okay. So COG UK was sort of a bit like CDC in
coordinating the sort of the members. We had nowhere near that kind of, no, it's
just a bunch of ragtag academics sticking their nose where it doesn't belong.
You were invited. It did belong. And in Australia, we kind of rapidly built
working groups and committees, you know, with representatives from every state.
And so, yeah, we kind of had to build that infrastructure, just like COG did, I
guess, in a way. It's interesting in other countries, because we've had people
from talk about their COVID responses. So people from Canada and so on.  And
it's interesting to note that health predominantly is considered a provincial
problem. I guess the philosophy is that a particular region will have its own
specific health issues and you need to fund it accordingly with that and you
need people there on the ground to actually explain what's going on and they
should have autonomy over it. And what's odd is that that worked, but that
doesn't work in a pandemic where the pathogen doesn't care about your little
provincial borders. It doesn't understand your jurisdictions. And a lot of
agencies had this issue that they didn't have this open data sharing agreements.
They didn't have MTAs, all the sort of bureaucratic stuff to be able to talk
with each other properly. And often it was some other entity that was initially
being a broker between all of them. So in the UK, you had Cog that came out from
outside of that doing it. You had OzTracker that was coming outside of doing it
and so on, like all these different, it came out. And on the UK side, what
happened over time, as much of what Lee was saying, was a lot of it was on the
Cog partners. And then slowly the capacity was built within each of the health
agencies and then we've given it back to them over time. Can I say as an
outsider to UK, I had no idea that each of the countries, the laws and
everything are at that level. So it's interesting that it's kind of evolving to
CDC. I still don't understand because I'm talking as an Australian, I don't get
it. It's like the United Kingdom is a country, but then Scotland and Wales is a
country. It's a country within a country. It's like, okay. You were born in
London. Surely you should know this. Yeah, but I left before I went to school
here, so I didn't get it explained to me. Yeah, it's quite complicated. British
Isles versus United Kingdom versus Great Britain. Is it okay to say British
Isles these days? I don't know. Well, the Republic of Ireland isn't that, so no.
No, so there you go. I don't know what we call it. We forgive you. You're an
American, so we expect you to be ignorant of the rest of the world. Lee has
finally learned how to pronounce Norwich after a couple of years. Yeah, but
we're not changing the intro. And what's that city in the Midlands of England
that starts with Berm? How do you pronounce that? Zero clue. Okay, so that's
zero clue because it sounds like you're about to send me a trick question. Is it
Birmingham? Yeah, that's pretty good. It's not Birmingham. That's in the U.S.,
and Birmingham is in the U.K. Okay, that was an on-the-fly guess because I
thought that was a trick question. I'm lucky because in Australia we have a lot
of U.K. place names, so we've learned how to pronounce everything. But even
Australians don't know how to pronounce it. I lived on Greenwich Crescent many
years ago, but everyone would say Greenwich Crescent, and it just came to me
every time I heard it. And we should probably delete this bit of the rant from
the podcast. No, go for it. Keep this. I just learned a few things during our
snack break from the hackathon where it's like Leicester instead of Leicester or
something. Leicester, Worcestershire. Worcestershire. Worcestershire sauce. So
I'm learning a few more of those things. And then how do you pronounce the city
where we're in right now? Bath. Bath? Not bath? Everyone has been saying bath to
me on the way, and I can't bring myself to say it. Should I be saying bath?
There's a divide in the U.K., so, you know, there's our consensus. But it's
dance versus dance. It's the same thing. It's a common vowel, different regional
dialects. Even in Australia we have a division on the vowels, some of these
vowels. Dance, trance, and dance or trance. Like, I'm a trance dance person, but
if you go to Adelaide in Australia, it's the other way around. How would you say
it? I say bath. I say bath just to annoy people. Because I think that's meant to
be the lower-brow pronunciation. Interesting. That's why I say bath. I just say
bath. Bath, bath. Stuff it. And do you necessarily pronounce it the same way as
if you're getting clean at home in a tub? Yeah, yeah. To me they're the same. I
take a bath. Well, you're going to see the Roman bath soon enough. You know,
I've done some of them. I keep having to tell people, you can't swim in the
Roman baths at bath. Well, there are special places I'm sure you can go where
they give you the Roman bath experience. But not in the actual, you know.
Because there are some, you can visit Roman baths, but you can't actually swim
in them. They're 2,000-year-old baths and you can still use it. Cool. Has it
been cleaned ever? I should hope so. Well, the water is a strange color, you
know. That's an indication that it's not very safe. Is that not spring water
here? It's kind of bluey, which usually means it's heavily alkaline. Like so
dangerous that you can't go near it. I've been noticing the tap water tastes
like maybe a little sulfuric. Is that? No, that's just a weird thing of the UK.
They love bore water. Okay. Like it rains so much here, but like for an
Australian that's really bizarre. Also the water here is very hard. It has a
high salt content. Soap doesn't lather here because of the water. But in
Australia, our water is soft. We don't have a high carbonate or water salt
content. So soap lathers are probably crazy. Nice. Good thing you don't have
hair tossing, otherwise it'd be wrecked by the time you leave. Yeah. I'm saving
a fortune on shampoo. Speaking of pronunciation, how do you say data or data or
phage or phage? Rooster or rancher? Oh, man. I change. I flip and change. Data,
I used to say data only, but now I say data. Like I got, you know, commander
data on Star Trek, but it was data. And then what was the other? Phage, phage
and phage. I say phage, but sometimes I change to phage. I sort of adapt to what
people around me are saying to fit in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Phage data. It is
rooter in Australia, but I just can't make myself say it, so I just say router.
Well, router might be considered the wrong thing in Australia. Yeah, it's
referring to an activity in Australia. Oh, didn't know that. Well, rooting
refers to when two people really love each other. Yeah, so when that packet is
being rooted through here. Yeah, it means it's royally stuffed. Well, there's a
famous Australian meme to do with whether you should have a comma, the Oxford
comma, which you may know is the comma before the last and in a list, whether
you have a comma or not. So what's the famous Australian thing where it's a
picture of a wombat and it says, eats roots and leaves. It's got two meanings.
We have eats shoots and leaves for a panda. Yeah, yeah, I remember. Now, you
might not believe us, but if you want to validate it, I think for one of the
football world cups, they had a promotion, which was they had a big banner and
they said, like, root for your team. And in Australia, they changed it to, I
think it's like cheer for your team instead. So all the Australian publicity
stuff literally changed the word just because they realized that we can't say
root for your team because that just, we don't want to encourage that. Because
it also has connotations about what football players should do the night before
a big match, whether they should or they shouldn't be allowed to. I think this
is a thing in baseball. They have to relax. Different coaches have different
rules, I believe. We horribly, horribly drifted off. We were talking about
serious, serious matters. You have pronunciation problems in the US as well.
Like Arkansas, not Arkansas. It's our Kansas. Arkansas. Yeah, it's Arkansas. But
then it's Kansas. If it's Kansas, why isn't it Arkansas? I know. And the other
thing is I found out that people from Missouri, a lot of them don't pronounce it
Missouri. They say Missouri, Missouri. They don't say Missouri. Missouri
sometimes. Missouri, yeah. Missouri, yeah. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But
not from that part of the country. So everything's a little foreign to me when
they bring that up to me too. It's like the UK versus all the individual
countries confuse me too. That's where we were. What is the UK to you? What do
you think the UK is? The UK to me is the place I fly into. What is the UK? Is it
a single country? It's not a country. Is it the United Kingdom? The UK to me
feels like a country. But I guess it's obviously wrong. But it feels like it's a
country. What country are you in right now, Lee? Tell me. I would say I was in
the UK. But I know the answer is England. So it's the United Kingdom and Great
Britain and Northern Ireland. So you are in the United Kingdom, Great Britain
and Northern Ireland. In England, you're in Great Britain as well, but which is
a big island. Okay. And you're also in England. You're in Europe as well, but
not in the European Union. Yeah. So England, Wales and Scotland are on the same
chunk. But Northern Ireland is on a separate chunk. Yeah. With Ireland. And
I've... That's right, there's nothing else on that island, right? No. The Isle
of Ireland.  But then, what are the other islands like? Channel Islands. Yeah,
so there are Crown Dependencies and... There's Jernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man,
Isle of Wight, the... Does that have tax evasion things there in any of those?
It's not a tax evasion. They set their own tax laws and they just decide not to,
you know, charge people tax. Nice. Yeah. So they are Crown Dependencies, so the
Queen is head of state, but they're not part of the United Kingdom. But they're
part of... Great Britain? Yes. Yes. Well, I don't know. There's a table that
tells you what... There's a... There's a matrix. There's some kind of complex
Venn Diagram. Yeah, Venn Diagram. That's the one. Do you think Charles has to
learn all that before he becomes king? I'm sure he knows it already. He's
been... He's been an understudy for the last seven decades. So thanks, Toss, for
joining us today and thanks, Lee, for actually seeing you in the flesh for a
change. Yeah. Did we say this already that this is the first time that we're
doing this in person? Doing this in person all together. Let's catch our mind,
everyone. So yeah, and we were just talking about just catching up and seeing
what we've been doing for the last few years and talking mainly COVID because
that's what we were doing. So yeah. See you next time. Great to talk with you
again. Thank you so much for listening to us at home. If you like this podcast,
please subscribe and rate us on iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, or the platform of
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podcast, please don't do anything. This podcast was recorded by the Microbial
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